Mammoth—riddle of the Ice Age

News recently flashed around the world of what many scientists hoped to be a nearly
whole mammoth, found in permafrost in the Taymyr Peninsula in northern Siberia.1,2
Once again fascinated, people asked: ‘What exactly are mammoths?’, ‘Where
did they come from?’, ‘When did they live?’, ‘Why did they
become extinct?’ and ‘Can they be cloned?’.

What is a mammoth?

Evidently a variety of elephant, mammoths belong to the mammalian order Proboscidea.3 Mammoths (genus Mammuthus)
had the usual elephantine features of a trunk and tusks. Mammoths had a large shoulder
hump and a sloping back; small ears and tail; very complex teeth; a small trunk
with a distinctive tip with two finger-like projections; huge, spirally curved tusks
up to 3.5 m (11.5 feet) long; and spiral locks of dark hair covering a silky underfur.4,5
Some were huge — the Columbian mammoth measured up to 4+ metres (14 feet)
high at the shoulders — about the same size as the largest living elephants.
But the woolly mammoth was smaller, and there were dwarf mammoths only two metres
(six feet) tall.5,6

Where did they come from?

The answer to such questions about the past comes from the Word of one who was there
— the Creator. He revealed in Genesis that He created land animals and people
on Day Six of Creation Week (Genesis
1:24–27). This passage teaches that God made distinct kinds of animals,
which would breed ‘after their kind’.

Created Kinds

Each of these kinds could split into a number of varieties, when small populations
containing a fraction of the original pre-existing genetic information
became isolated. Copying errors (mutations) which reduce information can
produce other varieties. This is not evolution in the particles-to-people
sense, because that requires new genes with new information.7

So what are the ‘kinds’? There are often problems matching the created
kinds to man-made classification systems, often relying on shape and size, even
though the system was founded by the Swedish creationist biologist Carl Linnaeus.8 From God’s Word we infer
that reproduction defines ‘kinds’. Thus if two creatures can interbreed,
they belong to the same kind. Many scientists define a species as a group
of individuals which can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Thus the
biblical kinds would have originally been species.

But the kind may be broader than a modern-day species. Because the different modern
varieties may have different fractions of the original gene pool, the offspring
from crossing different varieties (hybrids) may be sterile, or not survive. Thus
each created kind may have been the ancestor of several present-day species.9 But as long as two creatures can hybridize with true
fertilization, the two creatures are the same kind.10
Also, if two creatures can hybridize with the same third creature, they are all
members of the same kind.11,12 To illustrate the problems with the man-made system,
sometimes members of different ‘species’, and even higher groupings,
can produce fertile offspring.13 This means that they are really the
same species that has several varieties, hence a polytypic (many types) species.

Applying this to elephants, the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and
Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) can mate and produce offspring, albeit
short-lived.4 Thus they belong to the same created
kind, possibly even the same species, even though the man-made system calls them
separate ‘species’ and even different ‘genera’ (plural of
genus). Mammoths are considered to be closer to Asian elephants than African elephants
are. So if the mammoth lived today, it could very likely cross-breed with an Asian
elephant.4 Therefore the entire order Proboscidea probably
comprises only one created kind.13

The Encyclopædia Britannica provides unwitting support for the biblical
framework.14 In a table of fossil
placental mammals, the proboscideans (and all other orders) are preceded by dotted
lines, indicating no actual fossils of their alleged evolutionary ancestors.15 And it says: ‘The order Proboscidea has evolved
from unknown ancestors that were not much larger than pigs.’ Of course, if
the ancestors are ‘unknown’, we can’t know what size they were,
or even that they ever existed!

The rise and fall of the mammoth

The Flood

After their creation, God cursed the elephant kind along with the ‘whole creation’
(Romans
8:20–22) when Adam sinned. About 1,600 years later, God sent a global
Flood to extinguish man and all land (vertebrate) animals, apart from the representatives
of each kind that Noah took on the ocean-liner-sized Ark (Genesis
6–8). It’s possible that Noah took only one pair of proboscideans
on board.

However, the elephant kind could have already split into the varieties (‘genera’)
like the mammoths, mastodons, and African and Asian elephants. John Woodmorappe
has shown that the Ark was easily large enough to have taken pairs of each genus
of land vertebrate animal, and that this would provide enough genetic variation
to give rise to today’s varieties.16
Fully-grown elephants (age 25) were not needed; rather, it would be enough to take
juveniles just old enough to breed by the end of the Flood (age 8–9 for females;
11–12 males).17

The Flood did not leave too many fossils of large mammals, partly because they tended
to bloat and float, and be destroyed by scavengers. Many fossils of large mammals
that we do find were probably produced by local post-Flood catastrophes. A particular
type of catastrophe involved the mammoths …

The Ice Age

There is strong evidence that, following the Flood, for a time ice and snow covered
much of Canada and northern USA, northwestern Eurasia, Greenland and Antarctica.
Evolutionists believe there were many ice ages, but it’s more likely they
were advance/retreat cycles within a single Ice Age.

Evolutionists find the cause of the Ice Age a mystery. Obviously the climate would
need to be colder. But global cooling by itself is not enough, because then there
would be less evaporation, so less snow. How is it possible to have both a cold
climate and lots of evaporation?

The creationist meteorologist Michael Oard proposed that the Ice Age [possibly referred
to in
Job 37:10 and
38:22] was an aftermath of Noah’s Flood.18,19 When ‘all
the fountains of the great deep’broke up, much hot
water and lava would have poured directly into the oceans.

This would have warmed the oceans, increasing evaporation. At the same time, much
volcanic ash in the air after the Flood would have blocked out much sunlight, cooling
the land.

So the Flood would have produced the necessary combination of lots of evaporation
from the warmed oceans and cool continental climate from the volcanic ash ‘sunblock’.
This would have resulted in increased snowfall over the continents. With the snow
falling faster than it melted, ice sheets would have built up.

The end of the Ice Age

This ice buildup would probably have lasted several centuries. Eventually, the seas
gradually cooled, so evaporation would decrease, therefore the snow supply for the
continents would also decrease. And as the ash settled out of the atmosphere, it
would allow sunlight through. So the ice sheets began to melt. Sometimes the melting
would have been rapid enough for the rivers that drained these ice sheets to flood.
These catastrophes would have happened about 700 years after the Flood (see
aside).

Mammoths and the Ice Age

In areas worst affected by the Ice Age, natural selection would have eliminated
creatures lacking genes for survival in the cold. It would favour creatures with
existing genes for long fur for insulation; and small ears, tails and trunks (to
prevent heat loss from large surface areas). Again, this is not evolution, because
it generates no new genetic information.7 Indeed, modern
elephants never develop thick hair even when exposed to below-freezing temperatures
at night for months,20 simply because
the genetic information is lacking.

Elephants can breed quickly enough that the population could double four times per
century, so the population could have easily exceeded a million in the centuries
of the Ice Age.21 However, most
mammoths have left no trace: there are fewer than 50 known woolly mammoth carcasses,
only about a half-dozen of which were complete. But an estimated 50,000 tusks have
been found. Man hunted mammoths extensively, and even recorded this in cave paintings.
Fierce predators like the Smilodon (sabre-toothed tiger) also took their toll.

Mammoths in ice?

Some have claimed that the well-preserved frozen mammoths must have been snap-frozen
to about –97°C (–146°F). However, this is not so. Most frozen mammoths show
signs of scavenging and decay. Many years in the ice caused the flesh to dry out
(just like a stew left in a freezer for years), resulting in a mummy.22

Some frozen mammoths had partially digested stomach contents. But this doesn’t
prove a supercold snap freeze — a mastodon with stomach contents was found
in mid-western USA, where the ground was not even frozen.23 It’s possible that the elephant’s digestive
system itself explains the stomach contents being only partially digested. Its large
stomach is mainly a storage area, with only a little breakdown of the vegetation
by enzymes. Most digestion occurs in the huge cecum and large intestine with the
help of microbes fermenting the food.24

An evolutionist suggests that they ‘died suddenly by drowning or asphyxiation
following burial in mud flows, caved-in river banks, or collapsed gully walls’.25 Oard suggests flooding caused
by ice melting at the close of the Ice Age could have caused such local catastrophes,
and a quick drop in temperature (but not a snap-freeze) explains the freezing.

The location of the mammoths makes it unlikely they were formed during Noah’s
Flood. They are always found in frozen ‘muck’ in Alaska and ‘yedomas’
in Siberia, near the surface throughout the mid and high latitudes, mostly in river
valleys, and occasionally in ice wedges. Despite the myths, most mammoths are not
encased in ice.

The Zoological Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, holds some remarkably complete mammoth
carcasses from Siberia, including the Adams or Lena mammoth, now a skeleton three
metres (10 feet) high at the scapula (shoulder-blade); the Berezovka (or Beryozovka)
mammoth which was not fully-grown at about 2.6 m (8+ feet) shoulder height; the
Taymyr mammoth; and the 6–12-month-old Magadan mammoth calf nicknamed ‘Dima’.

Could we clone a mammoth?

There were high hopes with the latest mammoth found in Taymyr that enough of its
hereditary material — DNA — could be found to clone a mammoth. The proposal
was to extract the DNA from the nucleus of an intact cell, and implant it into the
egg cell (stripped of its own nucleus) of an Asian elephant.26

However, a recent New Scientist article bluntly stated ‘Forget about cloning
mammoths.’27 The DNA of this
mammoth is so fragmented that the longest sequence has only 100 base pairs (‘letters’28). New Scientist said:
‘But they are far from the billions of base pairs needed for cloning.“It’s
like a two-year-old trying to put together a battleship from two billion pieces
of metal,” says Greenwood [of the American Museum of Natural History in New
York].’ Incidentally, the extreme instability of DNA29 is actually a huge problem for theories of the origin
of life from a primordial soup.30

A clone would be a full mammoth, but another idea is to extract sperm and fertilize
the egg of an Asian elephant and produce a hybrid. But this also requires intact
DNA, so it won’t work either.31

Have any mammoths survived today?

There have been stories that mammoths were seen in the Eastern Ural mountains and
Vladivostok in Russia, as recently as 1918.6 While
these are not now verifiable, there is conclusive video and photographic proof that
some genes for characteristic mammoth features have survived, in some elephants
in Nepal.32

Conclusion

Although the media use mammoths as evolutionary propaganda, they can be properly
explained by a biblical world-view. Mammoths are a variety of the elephant kind,
created on Day 6. The elephant kind was preserved from extinction by being on board
Noah’s Ark. But many of the descendants of the Ark animals, including the
mammoths, died in catastrophes at the end of the Ice Age, some 4,000 years ago.
Some of their frozen carcasses are preserved, but their genetic material is not
intact. Some mammoth genes have lived on in Nepalese elephants.

Ice Age catastrophes

Part of the Grand Coulee Gorge, an 80-km-long trench carved through solid rock by
one Ice Age flood. Photo courtesy of ICR.

When the ice began to melt, about 500 years after the Flood, large lakes would have
built up. Sometimes, they would have been contained by natural ice dams for a while.
But when these finally cracked, the lakes would have burst through. This water can
have tremendous destructive power: when ancient Lake Missoula in Montana (USA) burst
an ice dam in Idaho, 2000 km3 (500 cubic miles) of water poured westward
at express-train speed — the Spokane Flood. It eroded 200 km3 (50
cubic miles) of sediment and bedrock, carving the elaborate Channeled Scablands
in eastern Washington State.1 This includes the Grand
Coulee, an 80-km (50-mile) long trench, one to six miles wide, with steep walls
up to 275 m (900 feet) high, chiselled through hard basalt and granite1
(shown at right).

But when J. Harlen Bretz proposed this explanation for the Channeled Scablands in
1923, it was rejected out-of-hand because of the anti-catastrophist bias in the
geological community. Bretz wasn’t vindicated till almost 40 years later.2 There is evidence for a catastrophe on a similar scale
in Siberia.3

Oard points out that much melt-water would also pour onto the ocean. Salt water
stays liquid below 0°C (32°F), and is denser than fresh water. So if melt-water
poured into the Arctic Ocean, it would tend to float on top, and freeze. The resulting
ice layer would cover much of the ocean’s surface. The ice would separate
the air from the ocean, and reflect sunlight, preventing it from heating the earth
(albedo effect), because this requires absorption of the radiation. Snow would soon
fall, increasing the albedo even more.

These effects would greatly outweigh the small amount of latent heat released when
the water froze — so much so that the temperature over the adjacent land could
drop 30 Celsius degrees (54 Fahrenheit degrees) in a week. This, plus wind chill, could explain the frozen
mammoth carcasses and the apparently sudden change in the climate.3

The implication is one-way — hybridization is evidence that
they are the same kind, but it does not necessarily follow that if hybridization
cannot occur then they are not members of the same kind. Return to text.

Marsh, Ref. 10, Ch. 3, gives many examples, including Bos
(true cattle) and Bison (American buffalo), which can produce a fertile
hybrid called a cattalo. Bos and Bison are classified as not only
different ‘species’ but different genera, but they are really the same
polytypic species by the common definition. Return to text.

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